Leon slept deeply, if briefly.  The process of turning back into a human had cost a great deal of magic power and concentration between him and the Thunderbird, and the process had exacted its toll upon his body.  Still, he was an eighth-tier mage, now, and sleep was hardly something he truly needed anymore.  After only about two hours of sleep, he was stirring in the bed that Alix and Maia had brought him to.

It was a near-identical copy to the quarters he and his retinue had been assigned on Sigebert’s flagship–the cabins of a visiting Paladin or someone else of high rank—but it was also clearly not Sigebert’s flagship.

Beside him on the bed, Maia had been snuggled up close to him with an arm across his chest.  She hadn’t been sleeping, so as he opened his eyes and instinctively started to rise, she was right there with him, sitting up in bed.

“Leon,” she whispered aloud.

Leon glanced at her, his eyes still bleary with sleep and fatigue.  But when his golden eyes met her lake-blues, his face couldn’t help but break out into a wide smile, and he pulled her into him and held her close.

Neither moved for several long minutes.  They didn’t need to speak to confirm each other’s physical state, nor did they even specifically need to vocalize their emotions.  Maia could feel that Leon was all right, and that he’d ascended to the eighth-tier, while Leon could feel her joy at his waking, and at his ascension.  However, while Leon could sense that Maia was all right, after taking some time, Maia pulled away from Leon and locked gazes with him again.

“You seem… different…” she said.

“I… think I am,” Leon said as his eyes narrowed in thought and suspicion.  He extended a hand above them, and with barely even a thought, fire began to crackle around his fingers.  It didn’t look any different than usual, not any darker, not any more potent.  It did seem that he could summon the flames with greater ease, though if that was due to his ascension or not, he couldn’t say.  The Thunderbird had told him that his blood from the Black Dragon had awakened, but he supposed that the Great Black Dragon had gone back to suppressing it.  It would take further testing on his part to figure out how effective that suppression was, now, but at the very least, he could see that his summoned fire looked no different than usual.

“What happened down there?” she asked.

Leon took a deep breath.  “Ancestors, I don’t even know where to start…”

Eventually, he started at roughly where he’d made the decision to take on Jormun alone, and the strange visions that had assaulted his mind that were the cause.  It seemed even clearer to Leon in hindsight that the Primal God had been responsible for that much, especially after it revealed that it had been the Thunderbird look-a-like the entire time.

Then, he largely skipped over the battle between him and Jormun with as few details as possible, but Maia wasn’t going to allow that.

“But what about that demon?” she asked.  “And that thing it was fighting?”

Leon went silent for another long moment, his eyes wandering the room yet not looking at anything in particular.

“You can trust me…” Maia whispered, and Leon felt his heart clench in response.

It was true, he could trust her with anything.  Yet, he wasn’t sure about this last secret of his, the one that he’d hidden from everyone, even Elise.  Consorting with demons was taboo in the Bull Kingdom, and warranted instant extra judicial execution if caught doing so.  Such things hardly mattered to Maia, but he still hesitated to tell her about his and Xaphan’s relationship.

After almost ten seconds of silence, Maia frowned lightly and said, “You don’t have to—”

“It’s fine,” Leon interrupted.  “I suppose this wasn’t something I should be keeping to myself, anyway.”

Slowly at first, but getting easier as he went on, Leon told Maia about how lost he felt immediately following his father’s death, and how just after losing his father, he encountered Xaphan.  It had seemed to be the best way forward at the time, making the contract with the demon.  And it did largely work out, with Xaphan’s power even coming in handy multiple times in the past four years.  But Xaphan was still a demon, so Leon made it as clear as he could that he didn’t worship him, or make anything even remotely resembling blood sacrifices.

“But the demon is on our side?” Maia asked when Leon was finally finished, after he retold the battle between himself and Jormun, including his summoning of Xaphan and Jormun’s summoning of his angel.

“Yes,” Leon replied unequivocally.  “I trust that rude bas—” Leon briefly recalled the Great Black Dragon calling him a bastard, and cut himself off.  “—I trust him with my life.  Maybe not anyone else’s, but mine?  Sure thing.  It’s hardly worth that much anyway, so trusting it to a demon is hardly—”

“Don’t finish that sentence!” Maia sternly warned him, and Leon felt a flash of anger rock through their connection.

With a playful, self-deprecating smile, he said, “All right, I won’t.  Just trying to lighten the mood a bit.”

Maia made a haughty show of turning away from him.  “You’re worth a great deal to me,” she said, and it was like a knife through Leon’s heart.

Quietly, he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her back into him.  “I’m sorry.  Bad joke.”

Maia turned back around, a gentle smile on her face.  “I forgive you,” she said like a Queen pardoning a man already on the headsman’s block.

Leon smiled back, and continued with his story.

---

It was another hour before he and Maia emerged from their room and into the main cabin, to the great joy of Anzu, and to a lesser extent, the rest of Leon’s retinue.  Leon spent a few minutes playing with Anzu and giving him all the head pats before he addressed the others.

“Thanks,” he simply said, hoping they understood.  They’d followed him this far, even though he was having some serious doubts if he was worthy of following like this.

“Don’t mention it,” Marcus replied with a wave of his hand.  “We hardly did much, anyway.  Seems like, uh, you as that bird thing, your lady, and that demon did most of the work, we kind of just sat around feeling useless.”

Alcander didn’t say anything, but Leon could see from his expression that he was feeling similarly useless.

Gaius, meanwhile, clapped Leon on the shoulder, and said, “Good to see you up and about.”

“You too,” Leon sincerely replied.

Alix, meanwhile, snuck up behind Leon about as well as she could, and then jumped up and grabbed him in a headlock.  He barely even bent over even with all her weight and strength trying to pull him down, but she acted like she was winning, anyway.

“That’s for leaving us behind!” she shouted as she thrashed about on his neck and over his shoulders.  “And that’s for coming back as that creepy fucking bird!  What was up with that?!”

“I think story time will have to wait, for now,” Gaius said, dampening the spirit in the room.  “Now that you’re up, Leon, there’s a lot that needs to get done, and I think there’s plenty that our… fleet would love to have your help with.”

Leon nodded, and then made his way back out onto the deck of the ship, followed closely by the others.  He had his own things he needed to take care of, too, chief among them finding his sword, and finding Xaphan.

The first thing he did upon stepping foot back out onto the deck, even before taking a long, deep breath of fresh air, was project his magic senses.  He largely kept his attention fixed far above the paltry dozen or so ships that remained floating, scanning the skies for Xaphan.  He figured the demon would still be flying.

In the time since he’d last been properly conscious and above ground to see it, the sky had cleared up completely.  There were a few wispy clouds in the sky, but they were fluffy and pure white, with not a single storm cloud to be seen.  It was fairly late, but the sun still shone quite brightly, and the open ocean was a beautiful shade of blue, purple, and red, reflecting the evening sky.

But after a brief pause, Leon realized exactly what was wrong with this picture: they were supposed to be in the same place as the eighth island’s remains, but the ocean was completely empty of anything that could remotely resemble a landmass, save for the shadows of those islands dozens of miles away.

“Everything’s gone…?” he whispered, vaguely remembering something to that effect from the battle.

“Whatever that big snake did sucked all the land below the water,” Alix explained.

“Sucked quite a few Legion personnel down with it,” Marcus added.

“How many survivors?” Leon asked.

“Among these ships?” Gaius spoke up.  “I’d say about three-and-a-half thousand sailors, maybe half a battalion of marines.  Of those ships that were sunk, we haven’t seen even a single survivor.”

[There are a lot of things that live this far out to sea that have probably eaten their corpses,] Maia added.  [The storm would summon them, that serpent would’ve kept them at bay.  Without it around, they feasted.]

“A pleasant thought,” Marcus said, turning slightly pale.

“They were probably all dead by that point,” Alcander pointed out.  “Either drowned in the storm, or finished off by that serpent.  Not a lot of drawn-out deaths, I should think.”

Marcus grimaced.  “Small comfort after all of that.”

“Every available comfort ought to be taken after a battle like that,” Alcander responded, his tone less uncaring and more exhausted and resigned.

Leon could understand his point of view.  Better to focus on the good in any given situation, even if that good is only slightly less-terrible than the rest of it.

Resting his hands upon the guardrail of the deck, Leon noticed several Legion sailors exit the command tower, take a quick look around, and start heading in his direction once they noticed him.  He gritted his teeth, just barely refraining from pulled back his lips into an annoyed grin, a threatening baring of his fang—of his teeth.  Until he had his ducks in a row, he didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s problems, even though he knew he had to.

He still had a few minutes before they arrived, though, so he took some more time to examine their surroundings.  His magic senses had grown in power so much that he was rather overwhelmed—he could see everything within a two hundred mile radius of the ship, and the sheer amount of information that poured into his brain was extremely disorienting and more than he could handle.

He refocused the scope of his search, taking his time as he reveled in the power on one hand, but also quite impatient to see some results on the other.  By the time the sailors from the command tower had approached, he’d seen neither hide nor hair of Xaphan, and his sword was still nowhere to be found.  He was actually rather scared to ask anyone about them, fearing that they might try to convince him both were gone and now out of his reach.

His sword, Leon could at least see their perspective.  Even if he knew where it was beneath the waves, he had no clue how to reach it—if even Maia was unwilling to go that far below the waves around here, then he more than hesitated to just jump down there and try to use his water magic to get it back.

Still, he felt empty and restless with it gone, and he had no intention of leaving this place until it was back in hand.

“Uh, Sir Leon?” the lower-ranked of the two Legion sailors asked several awkward seconds after he and his companions approached Leon.

“Drop the ‘Sir’,” Leon said, still staring out at the sea, trying to find even the slightest hint where his partner or his weapon might be.

“Right,” the sailor said, his voice quivering with nervousness.  “The Legate requests your presence.  We have some… visitors…”

Leon froze for a moment in confusion, and he spared the sailor a quick glance, and then one more at his superior, who nodded in confirmation.

The superior clarified, “That was quite a battle… whatever you and that demon did—” Leon shot the superior a glare of warning, and his words hitched in his throat.  “—I mean, there was a ton of magic being thrown around.  Even this far away from the centers of power, people noticed.  While you were resting, two envoys from the Central Empires arrived, and they’ve asked to speak with all of our representatives.  The Legate would like for you and your Lady to be present at the meeting.”  He nodded to Maia to make sure Leon knew who he was talking about.

Leon sighed.  “There a time frame for this?”

“Uh, no, Si—” the junior sailor said, catching himself right before calling Leon by the knightly style.  “The sooner this is taken care of, the better, though.  The fleet’s communication stone went down with Sir Sigebert’s ship, so we’re on our own to deal with this.  Not even Dame Basina or Sir Theuderic are in any position to help.”

With a quick redirection of his magic senses, Leon smiled as he saw a few Legion scouts at the edge of his range scouting out the waters around the fifth island.  If the scouts were only just there, then the other two fleets were still at the fourth island, but they ought to be wrapping things up on their end.  The remnants of Sigebert’s fleet would probably meet up with them at the fifth island.

“I’ll head in in a moment,” he said, and Alix, as if she were still his squire, quickly stepped in to take the details of the meeting as Leon turned his attention back to the sea.

[Ancestor,] he whispered into his soul realm, knowing the Thunderbird to still be at the mountain where they’d replicated the Primal God’s enchantment.  [I can’t leave without the family blade.]

[Nor should you,] replied the Thunderbird, her resonant voice dripping with arrogance.  [I bore that sword since the Primal Age.  It has been one of the solidest foundation stones upon which our Clan thrived, one of the most potent weapons that rendered our enemies but ash on the wind!]

[Which is just why I want it back,] Leon quietly replied.  [I can’t leave without it…]  His voice shook, and the Thunderbird almost audibly restrained her arrogance.

[I understand,] she said, her tone turning motherly.  [It is of my blood, blood which you share.  It is Adamant, and will not suffer at all for being out at sea, and having once been the seat of the Iron Needle, it will not tolerate just anyone taking it in hand.]

[That’s good to know, but how do I get it back?] Leon asked.  [Surely there’s a way?  Even if I have to carve this entire ship into one giant enchantment to dredge it up from the ocean floor, I’ll do it…]

[It shouldn’t require that much,] the Thunderbird said with amusement.  [The blade will long to return to you.  You just have to call for it, and it will answer.]

Leon fought back against the urge to immediately roll his eyes.

[You make it sound so easy,] he drily stated.

[Extend your hand,] the Thunderbird instructed, and after a moment of hesitancy for not wanting to appear weird in front of everyone, Leon followed her instruction.  Looking weird was the least of his problems, right now.  [Good,] the Thunderbird said.  [Now, reach out with your heart and mind, and will the sword to return.  Let my power flow through your hand and show it the perfect place to rest, but show your intent to wield it in battle again!]

Her voice grew in volume until she was practically roaring within his soul realm, and he couldn’t help but get a bit caught up in her hype.  Lightning danced around his fingers as his companions took a step or two back and asked some questions of him, which he was a little too focused to answer.

He reached out with his intention, silently shouting, though not in any recognizable tongue.  The blade was of his Clan, it was as much a part of him as the Thunderbird’s power.  Neither he nor it would be complete until they were reunited, and he reached out with his longing as well; longing for that reunion of hand and blade.

And after fifteen increasingly desperate seconds, his hand extended, power flowing through his body, his will growing, the silent roar in his head growing louder, a single bolt of golden lightning shot up from the sea and into the clear dusky sky.  A moment later, the blade of House Raime exploded out of the sea and slammed into Leon’s hand, sending him almost stumbling back a few steps with the force of its arrival, the deck beneath his feet remaining intact only by being Heartwood and not lesser material.

His blade was back, sparking with power, rejoicing in its own way at being reunited with him, the blood in the Adamant singing in tune with the blood in his fingers, lightning crackling around him.

“IT WORKED!” Leon couldn’t help but shout in joy as his face practically split in two with his unabashed smile, and the deck began to creak and groan as, in his instinctive celebration, he let his aura go a little too wild.

“Uh, Leon?” Alix interrupted in alarm.  “That’s pretty spectacular, but maybe rein it in a little?”

Leon glanced around, and was immediately struck with embarrassment over just how many sailors there were on the deck who were almost doubled over under the weight of his aura, and staring at him with accusation in their eyes.

“Ah, uh, sorry about that,” Leon said as he clamped down on his emotional outburst.  His eyes found their way down to his blade again, though, and the smile stayed plastered across his face.  With a flash of light, a scabbard appeared at his waist.  Ever since he’d learned how to pull objects into his soul realm, he’d rarely needed one for his sword, but right now, he wasn’t about to let it out of his sight.  Having it back at his waist for at least a little while would serve as great comfort over the next few hours as he dealt with everything else that was on his plate.

Now in a spectacularly good mood, Leon turned to Alix and said, “All right, where’s these envoys?  Better to deal with them now before something finds a way to piss me off.”

“I don’t think we’ll reach the conference room without that happening,” Alix joked, and Leon reeled back as if physically struck, his eyes and eyebrows curling as if in surprise, though his playful act was ruined by the smile that refused to leave his face.

“You wound me, you truly do,” Leon replied.  And with that, with his blade finally back, Leon felt just about whole, and in the rare mood where he was ready to deal with some diplomats.  Xaphan was still missing, but Xaphan was a full-grown demon, he didn’t need Leon worrying about him.

—-

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